Calendar:Charter

Overall Mission

We're trying to provide software to make time management easier which makes effective use of Internet resources and doesn't bind the user to a single service or application.

What this means

By "time management" we intend to encompass aspects of calendaring, scheduling, and task lists.

In order to be "easier" we intend to follow Mozilla's tradition of building easy-to-use and easy-to-learn applications. In the words of Firefox's charter:

"We aim to provide the right set of features - not too many or too few."

We will make as few compromises "as possible where user experience is concerned. We will not compromise the main line UI to placate an element of the community. Usability is a large area consisting not only of the things one typically considers related to the user experience such as the design of dialog boxes and windows, but also things such as interaction design (looking at how users try and accomplish a task, noting the paths they take and attempting to optimize those paths) and performance (reaction speed from a piece of software is important so as not to annoy the user - perceived speed is often more important than actual speed)."

We recognize that the internet can be a valuable tool in facilitating easier time management through such services as search/discoverability of calendaring data and iTIP/Free-busy while also requiring that a smooth offline experience is possible for users.

We intend to provide a client that follows existing open standards and interoperates well with other such clients as well as providing low barriers to entry/exit through effective importing and exporting tools.

We want to take advantage of the excellent extension system provide by the toolkit platform, to allow for experimentation in new areas without affecting the core application.

We will retain a tight command and control hierarchy because UI design is not a committee driven process. Application design must be nimble and testing is better than discussion. Therefore, we will strive to make changes quickly and then get them to people so that we can refine them based on observation of user interactions.

We aim to deliver software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, with the goal of integrating as slickly as possible into each of those systems while keeping download size small.